AMD expands Zen 3 to laptops at CES 2021

AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su was back this year to deliver the company’s CES 2021 keynote, which the entire industry followed closely. 2020 has been a great year for AMD, and it started at CES 2020 with the announcement of the Ryzen 4000 series in laptops. While AMD has not fully reported on financial results for full year 2020, expectations are high for AMD’s fourth quarter and full year 2020 results. The company has made a significant turnaround in processors consumer and business and significant progress on the GPU. AMD is now in a leadership position in desktop processors, something the company hasn’t had in over a decade, and the industry expected this to spill over into laptops.

AMD has traditionally used CES to launch its latest generation of laptop processors, and this year was no different with the introduction of the Ryzen 5000 series of mobile processors. The Ryzen 5000 processor series is the fastest ever released by the company and has three different performance levels: low power U series processors, high performance H series processors and high performance gaming processors. performance of the HX series. However, there is one thing about the Ryzen 5000 series that some may not know, not all Ryzen 5000 series from AMD have the Zen 3 architecture. Only the Ryzen 5 5600U and Ryzen 7 5800U are Zen 3, which benefit from a higher IPC, higher clock speed and more shared cache.

AMD’s Ryzen 5000 HX notebook processor series currently consists of two processors, the Ryzen 9 5900HX and the Ryzen 9 5980HX. Both processors are eight core designs with 20MB L2 and L3 cache and boost 4.6 and 4.8 GHz. These chips have a TDP of 45W + which we assume means 45W most of the time except in specific scenarios but at the moment we don’t know what that means entirely other than they are very capable processors. These are the processors you’d expect AMD to roll out to compete with Intel’s latest 11 processors.^e Gen game processors that I touched on earlier this week. Many OEMs have already committed to using these chips in their gaming laptops, including Acer and ASUS.

Overall, I think AMD’s overall laptop line has become more complete and attractive to OEMs and consumers and that is why AMD has been successful in continuously developing the laptop design of the industry. company, year after year. In fact, in just two years, AMD has managed to double its overall gains in mobile design, from 70 systems with the Ryzen 3000 series to 150 mobile systems with the Ryzen 5000 series. This shows that OEMs are embracing digital processors. ‘AMD on both desktop and mobile in a way they’ve never had before. In fact, Lisa Su had CEOs of HP and Lenovo as well as Microsoft’s Panos Panay “ on stage ” to talk about their relationship with the company, which shows buy-in from the biggest players in the industry. AMD will need to overcome Intel’s experience-based approach with Evo and vPro to achieve the highest levels of success. I think AMD will also have to find a way to deal with Intel’s demystification of its battery-powered performance and “RUGs” (representative user guides).

Overall, AMD showed at this CES that the company’s momentum is only gaining traction in the mobile market and that the Zen 3 architecture is showing strength from low power mobile to computing. high performance. Last year’s CES was a showcase of what AMD has managed to accomplish when it returns to competition and this year’s CES was a victory lap to show how far the company has really come. . I hope to see more of AMD on the GPU front later this year and if the overall dynamics of the business can help it overcome some challenges on the GPU front, although I think the RDNA 2 architecture and the 6800 XT have shown great promise.

Note: Anshel Sag, Senior Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, contributed to this note.

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